The Mortal Instruments - Complete Collection (197 page)

“Love isn’t a weakness.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” she said, and glanced past him, with a look as cold and pointed as an icicle.

He turned, not wanting to, knowing he must, and looked behind him.

There on the brick walkway was Jace. He wore a dark suit and a white shirt. Standing in front of him was Clary, still in the pretty gold-colored dress she had worn to the Ironworks party. Her long, wavy red hair had come out of its knot and hung down around her shoulders. She stood very still in the circle of Jace’s arms. It would almost have looked like a romantic picture if it were not for the fact that in one of his hands, Jace was holding a long and glittering bone-handled knife, and the edge of it was pressed against Clary’s throat.

Simon stared at Jace in total and absolute shock. There was no emotion on Jace’s face, no light in his eyes. He seemed utterly blank.

Very slightly he inclined his head.

“I brought her, Lady Lilith,” he said. “Just as you asked.”

Clary had never been so cold.

Even when she had crawled out of Lake Lyn, coughing and sputtering its poisonous water onto the shore, she hadn’t been this cold. Even when she had thought Jace was dead, she hadn’t felt this terrible icy paralysis in her heart. Then she had burned with rage, rage against her father. Now she just felt ice, all the way down to her toes.

She had come back to consciousness in the marble lobby of a strange building, under the shadow of an unlit chandelier. Jace had been carrying her, one arm under her bent knees, the other supporting her head. Still dizzy and groggy, she’d buried her head against his neck for a moment, trying to remember where she was.

“What happened?” she had whispered.

They had reached the elevator. Jace pushed the button, and Clary heard the rattle that meant the machine was moving down toward them. But where were they?

“You were unconscious,” he said.

“But how—” She remembered then, and fell silent. His hands on her, the sting of her stele on her skin, the wave of darkness that had come over her. Something
wrong
with the rune he had drawn on her, the way it had looked and felt. She stayed motionless in his arms for a moment, and then said:

“Put me down.”

He set her down on her feet, and they looked at each other. Only a small space separated them. She could have reached out and touched him, but for the first time since she had met him, she didn’t want to. She had the terrible feeling that she was looking at a stranger. He looked like Jace, and sounded like Jace when he spoke, and had felt like Jace when she was holding him. But his eyes were strange and distant, as was the tiny smile playing about his mouth.

The elevator doors opened behind him. She remembered standing in the nave of the Institute, saying “I love you” to a closed elevator door. The gap yawned behind him now, as black as the mouth of a cave. She felt for the stele in her pocket; it was gone.

“You knocked me out,” she said. “With a rune. You brought me here.
Why?”

His beautiful face was entirely, carefully blank. “I had to do it. I didn’t have a choice.”

She turned and ran then, going for the door, but he was faster than she was. He always had been. He swung in front of her, blocking her path, and held out his hands. “Clary, don’t run,” he said. “Please. For me.”

She looked at him incredulously. His voice was the same—he sounded just like Jace, but not like him—like a recording of him, she thought, all the tones and patterns of his voice there, but the life that animated it gone. How had she not realized it before? She had thought he sounded remote because of stress and pain, but no. It was that he was
gone
. Her stomach turned over, and she bolted for the door again, only to have him catch her around the waist and swing her back toward him. She pushed at him, her fingers locking into the fabric of his shirt, ripping it sideways.

She froze, staring. On the skin of his chest, just over his heart, was a rune.

It wasn’t one she had ever seen before. It wasn’t black, like Shadowhunter runes were, but dark red, the color of blood. And it lacked the delicate grace of the runes from the Gray Book. It was scrawling, ugly, its lines sharp and cruel rather than curving and generous.

Jace didn’t seem to see it. He stared down at himself as if wondering what she was gazing at, then looked at her, puzzled. “It’s all right. You didn’t hurt me.”

“That rune—,” she began, but cut herself off, hard. Maybe he
didn’t
know it was there. “Let me go, Jace,” she said instead, backing away from him. “You don’t have to do this.”

“You’re wrong about that,” he said, and reached for her again.

This time she didn’t fight. What would happen even if she escaped? She couldn’t just leave him here. Jace was still there, she thought, trapped somewhere behind those blank eyes, maybe screaming for her. She had to stay with him. Had to know what was happening. She let him pick her up and carry her into the elevator.

“The Silent Brothers will notice you left,” she said, as the buttons for floor after floor lit up while the elevator rose. “They’ll alert the Clave. They’ll come looking—”

“I need not fear the Brothers. I wasn’t a prisoner; they weren’t expecting me to want to leave. They won’t notice I’m gone until they wake up tomorrow morning.”

“What if they wake up earlier than that?”

“Oh,” he said, with a cold certainly, “they won’t. It’s much more likely the other partygoers at the Ironworks will notice you’re missing. But what can they do about it? They’ll have no idea where you went, and Tracking to this building is blocked.” He stroked her hair back from her face, and she went still. “You’re just going to have to trust me. No one’s coming for you.”

He didn’t bring the knife out until they left the elevator, and then he said, “I would never hurt you. You know that, don’t you?” even as he flicked her hair back with the tip of the blade and pressed the edge to her throat. The icy air hit her bare shoulders and arms as soon as they were out on the roof. Jace’s hands were warm where he touched her, and she could feel the heat of him through her thin dress, but it didn’t warm her, not inside. Inside she was filled with jagged slivers of ice.

She grew colder still when she saw Simon, looking at her with his huge dark eyes. His face looked scrubbed blank with shock, like a white piece of paper. He was looking at her, and Jace behind her, as if he were seeing something fundamentally
wrong
, a person with their face turned inside-out, a map of the world with all the land gone and nothing left but ocean.

She barely looked at the woman beside him, with her dark hair and her thin, cruel face. Clary’s gaze had gone immediately to the transparent coffin on its pedestal of stone. It seemed to glow from within, as if lit by a milky inner light. The water that Jonathan was floating in was probably not water but some other, less natural liquid. Normal Clary, she thought dispassionately, would have screamed at the sight of her brother, floating still and dead-looking and totally unmoving in what looked like Snow White’s glass coffin. But frozen Clary just stared with a remote and distant shock.

Lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony
. Well, some of that was true. When she had met Sebastian, his hair had been black, but it was white-silver now, floating around his head like albino seaweed. The same color as his father’s hair.
Their
father’s hair. His skin was so pale it looked as if it could be made up of luminous crystals. But his lips were colorless too, as were the lids of his eyes.

“Thank you, Jace,” the woman that Jace had called Lady Lilith said. “Nicely done, and very prompt. I thought I was going to have difficulties with you at first, but it appears I worried for nothing.”

Clary stared. Though the woman did not look familiar, her
voice
was familiar. She had heard that voice before. But where? She tried to pull away from Jace, but his grip on her only tightened. The edge of the knife kissed her throat. An accident, she told herself. Jace—even this Jace—would never hurt her.

“You,” she said to Lilith between her teeth. “What have you done to Jace?”

“Valentine’s daughter speaks.” The dark-haired woman smiled. “Simon? Would you like to explain?”

Simon looked like he was going to throw up. “I have no idea.” He sounded as if he were choking. “Believe me, you two were the last thing I expected to see.”

“The Silent Brothers said that a demon was responsible for what’s been happening with Jace,” Clary said, and saw Simon look more baffled than ever. The woman, though, just watched her with eyes like flat obsidian circles. “That demon was you, wasn’t it? But why Jace? What do you want from us?”

“‘Us’?” Lilith pealed with laughter. “As if you mattered in this, my girl. Why you? Because you are a means to an end. Because I needed both these boys, and both of them love you. Because Jace Herondale is the one person you trust more than anyone else in the world. And
you
are someone the Daylighter loves enough to give up his own life for. Perhaps
you
cannot be harmed,” she said, turning to Simon. “But
she
can be. Are you so stubborn that you will sit back and watch Jace cut her throat rather than give up your blood?”

Simon, looking like death itself, shook his head slowly, but before he could speak, Clary said, “Simon, no! Don’t do it, whatever it is. Jace wouldn’t hurt me.”

The woman’s fathomless eyes turned to Jace. She smiled. “Cut her,” she said. “Just a little.”

Clary felt Jace’s shoulders tense, the way they had in the park when he’d been showing her how to fight. She felt something at her throat, like a stinging kiss, cold and hot at once, and felt a warm trickle of liquid spill down onto her collarbone. Simon’s eyes widened.

He had cut her. He had actually done it. She thought of Jace crouched on the floor of the bedroom at the Institute, his pain clear in every line of his body.
I dream that you come into my room. And then I hurt you. I cut you or strangle or stab you, and you die, looking up at me with those green eyes of yours while your life bleeds away between my hands
.

She had not believed him. Not really. He was Jace. He would never hurt her. She looked down and saw the blood staining the neckline of her dress. It looked like red paint.

“You see now,” said the woman. “He does what I tell him. Don’t blame him for it. He is completely within my power. For weeks I have crept through his head, seeing his dreams, learning his fears and wants, his guilts and desires. In a dream he accepted my Mark, and that Mark has been burning through him ever since—through his skin, down into his soul. Now his soul is in my hands, to shape or direct as I see fit. He will do whatever I say.”

Clary remembered what the Silent Brothers had said.
When a Shadowhunter is born, a ritual is performed, a number of protective spells placed upon the child by both the Silent Brothers and the Iron Sisters. When Jace died and then was raised, he was born a second time, with those protections and rituals stripped away. It would have left him as open as an unlocked door—open to any kind of demonic influence or malevolence.

I did this
, Clary thought.
I brought him back, and I wanted it kept secret. If we had only told someone what had happened, maybe the ritual could have been done in time to keep Lilith out of his head
. She felt sick with self-loathing. Behind her Jace was silent, as still as a statue, his arms around her and the knife still at her throat. She could feel it against her skin when she took a breath to speak, keeping her voice even with an effort. “I understand that you control Jace,” she said. “I don’t understand
why
. Surely there are other, easier ways to threaten me.”

Lilith sighed as if the whole business had grown tedious. “I need you,” she said, with exaggerated patience, “to get Simon to do what I want, which is give me his blood. And I need Jace not just because I needed a way to get you here, but as a counterweight. All things in magic must balance, Clarissa.” She pointed at the rough black circle drawn on the tiles, and then at Jace. “He was the first. The first to be brought back, the first soul restored to this world in the name of Light. Therefore he must be present for me to successfully restore the second, in the name of the Dark. Do you understand now, silly girl? We are all needed here. Simon to die. Jace to live. Jonathan to return. And you, Valentine’s daughter, to be the catalyst for it all.”

The demon woman’s voice had dropped to a low chant. With a shock of surprise Clary realized that she now knew where she had heard it before. She saw her father, standing inside a pentagram, a black-haired woman with tentacles for eyes kneeling at his feet. The woman said,
The child born with this blood in him will exceed in power the Greater Demons of the abysses between the worlds. But it will burn out his humanity, as poison burns the life from the blood
.

“I know,” Clary said through stiff lips. “I
know who you are
. I saw you cut your wrist and drip blood into a cup for my father. The angel Ithuriel showed it to me in a vision.”

Simon’s eyes darted back and forth between Clary and the woman, whose dark eyes held a hint of surprise. Clary guessed she didn’t surprise easily. “I saw my father summon you. I know what he called you.
My Lady of Edom
. You’re a Greater Demon.
You
gave your blood to make my brother what he is. You turned him into a—a horrible
thing
. If it weren’t for you—”

“Yes. All that is true. I gave my blood to Valentine Morgenstern, and he put it in his baby boy, and this is the result.” The woman placed her hand gently, almost as a caress, against the glass surface of Sebastian’s coffin. There was the oddest smile on her face. “You might almost say that, in a way, I am Jonathan’s mother.”

“I told you that address didn’t mean anything,” Alec said.

Isabelle ignored him. The moment they had stepped through the doors of the building, the ruby pendant around her neck had pulsed, faintly, like the beat of a distant heart. That meant demonic presence. Under other circumstances she would have expected her brother to sense the weirdness of the place just like she did, but he was clearly too sunk in gloom about Magnus to concentrate.